AI searches 100 million Hubble images in 2.5 days, finding ~1,400 anomalies including 800+ never described
Result confirmed
The takeaway
ESA researchers (Astronomy & Astrophysics, Dec 2025) used AnomalyMatch to scan 99.6 million Hubble Legacy Archive cutouts in about 2.5 days.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- 99.6M image cutouts in ~2.5 days
- ~1,400 anomalies; >800 not previously described; 86 candidate gravitational lenses
- Humans inspected all flagged images
What happened
A semi-supervised anomaly detector swept the full Hubble archive, and experts reviewed the top-ranked oddities.
Why it matters
It shows the AI-first search pattern that surveys such as Rubin/LSST and Euclid will depend on.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 primary
Primary
- ESA/Hubble: heic2603esahubble.org, official
- ESA: 1,400 quirky objects found in Hubble’s archiveesa.int, official
- arXiv 2505.03508arxiv.org, paper
Changes
- Filed